Chicken Vindaloo

I don’t cook Indian food that much but I always have requests from readers on popular Indian recipes on Rasa Malaysia. Recently, someone requested for chicken vindaloo recipe and I immediately reached out to my good friend Simply Reem to share her recipe. So here it is, the chicken vindaloo recipe, from a talented cook and photographer Reem. I have tasted Reem‘s Indian food on many occasions and she is an EXCELLENT cook. I have never tasted better home-cooked Indian meals. Enjoy!

Vindaloo is a spicy Indian curry from the region of Goa. The Portuguese brought the dish very similar to this to India leading to the origin of Vindaloo. The name Vindaloo is itself derived from the Portuguese dish that was known as “Carne de Vinha d’Alhos” that literary means a dish made of meat usually pork cooked with wine. Slowly the locals of Goa added their touch of spices and blends to the Portuguese dish and replaced the wine with the vinegar and finally the beautiful hot Vindaloo curry was created and is now a pride of Goan/Indian Cuisine.

Often the restaurant regards this dish as fiery hot and has potatoes added to it. This is a spicy curry but not necessarily a fiery hot one. Also potatoes are not included in traditional preparation of Vindaloo. Even though the word aloo means a potato in Hindi but it doesn’t means potatoes here in the name of the dish Vindaloo. The reason potatoes became a part of the dish was merely it increased the quantity of the dish keeping it cost effective as meat is an expensive ingredient and also it made the curry a little thicker.

As this dish started to gain popularity among the different regions of India, people started using different form of meat such as lamb, beef, mutton or chicken instead of pork. Today I am sharing the recipe for Chicken Vindaloo, a beautiful version of the famous and scrumptious Vindaloo Curry. If you want to use pork or any other meat instead of chicken you can do it here, just adjust the final cooking time accordingly.

Hello, just to comment on the Portuguese origin of Vindalho (as they call it in Goa). You are right in saying that it cames from Vinha de Alhos and this means wine(vinho) and garlic(alho). To these two main ingredients, usually we add a paste made from red peppers(not hot) and some vinegar is added towards the end.
I have learned so much here, it’s time to give something back

Hello Bee, since I was the requester (or one of several requesters) for the Vindaloo recipe you are referring to in your introduction let me thank you for considering my wish to get a nice recipe of this excellent meal. I will try it out immediately this weekend and will keep you informed about the result. Thousand thanks and all the best wishes from Germany, Mario
(BTW: for many months now there is hardly a week where your cook book or your rasamalaysia.com webpages are not guiding or inspiring me on some nice meals)

Can you clarify the instructions? “In another clean glass bowl add vinegar and soak all the ingredients needed for the spice blend for 15-20 minutes. Then blend these into a fine paste using a blender.”

Am I suppose to throw in all the spices into the vinegar and let it soak for 15-20 min. before blending it?

Hi, sorry, but it is still unclear to me. Did you mean discard the vinegar, taking only the spices out for blending OR blend it along with the 1/2 cup vinegar? I had a fight with my husband actually arguing about this part of the instructions.

This is one of my favorite Indian recipes, I love it when it’s extra hot! I never knew the original version was not spicy hot. I grew up near “little India” here in New Jersey (US) and dish always made me sweat!

This looks awesome! We feature cuisines of different nations on our blog, and I feel like vindaloo could be used to represent India, England, and probably all kinds of other places the Indian diaspora has settled.

I made it in a rush and only let it marinate for 2 hours vs the recommended 6. I wonder if this impacted the taste of the chicken..
my recipe came out a bit bland and I omitted the cloves because at first I didn’t know what cloves were until after I had looked up other recipes and found out it wasn’t a typo for ‘cloves of.. ‘ but cloves as an ingredient by itself..

This recipe was great and very easy to make! I didn’t feel like chicken so I used a little over 2 lbs. of boneless pork ribs (cut into large cubes) and it came out really well! I also used butter instead of the oil. Not the healthiest substitutions but it tasted great!

Am I the only one who ended up with something REALLY vinegar’y? I might have done the conversion to metrics wrong, but my vindaloo tasted of nothing but really sharp vinegar D: I’ve looked at other recipes for this dish and they all use way less vinegar. Just a heads up!